Three Crises, One Pattern: How Washington Learned to Stop Vetting

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Lord Mandelson didn’t get properly vetted. James Comey got indicted over a seashell photograph. And somewhere in a Memphis courtroom, the National Guard is staying put because nobody can quite agree on whether that’s legal.

These aren’t three separate news cycles. They’re symptoms of the same disease.

The Vetting Collapse

Start with the British Prime Minister’s choice to appoint Peter Mandelson as a senior adviser without apparently doing the homework that a first-year HR manager would handle. We now know, thanks to reporting in the headlines, that Sir Philip Barton—a former senior official—was worried about Mandelson’s links to Jeffrey Epstein and flagged those concerns. Somewhere in the machinery of government, that alarm bell got ignored or muffled or lost entirely.

Then Morgan McSweeney, the PM’s own ex top adviser, went on record saying he made a “serious mistake” recommending Mandelson because the peer didn’t give the “full truth” about the Epstein relationship.

The really damning part? When a Conservative-led motion tried to get the Privileges Committee to assess whether the PM actually misled Parliament about this, it went nowhere. No inquiry. No teeth. Just a shrug and a move to the next agenda item.

Photo by Tim Mossholder / Pexels

This is what institutional decay looks like. It’s not a scandal—it’s the infrastructure of accountability breaking down in real time, and everyone involved acting like that’s totally normal.

I’ve covered enough Washington to recognize the pattern. When vetting fails at this level, it’s rarely because someone was lazy. It’s because the people doing the appointing either didn’t want to know the answer, or they knew it and decided it didn’t matter anyway.

The Comey Indictment Theater

Then there’s the James Comey situation, which borders on the absurd if it weren’t so genuinely alarming.

The Trump administration just secured a new indictment against the former FBI director. The charge? It stems from a photograph of seashells on a North Carolina beach.

I’m going to be honest here: I don’t fully understand the legal theory that gets you from “seashell photo” to federal indictment. I’ve read three explainers and I’m still fuzzy. But what’s crystal clear is the message being sent. This isn’t about the seashells. It’s a signal that if you’re a political enemy of this administration, they will find—or create—a legal rationale to prosecute you.

Compare this to 2017. When Trump first came to office, there was at least some internal resistance. Career prosecutors had opinions. The Justice Department had norms, even if they were under strain. Now? The machinery is greased. They indict over photographs of shells because they can.

This is what happens when vetting and accountability disappear. You don’t get careful governance. You get performative punishment.

The Evangelical Splinter

The third piece of this puzzle might be the most telling.

Trump’s rhetoric on religion, his hardline immigration policies, and the U.S. war in Iran have started splintering his coalition of Christian voters—the same voters who returned him to the White House. That’s not a minor crack. That’s a load-bearing wall developing a fracture.

Why mention this alongside Mandelson and Comey? Because it shows what happens when leadership stops pretending to care about the consent of the governed. You don’t get a disciplined political movement. You get a crumbling coalition held together by resentment and personality cult dynamics.

Photo by Andrew Neel / Pexels

The Border Chaos

Meanwhile, appeals courts are splitting on whether Trump’s detention policies for undocumented immigrants are legal. One court ruled against the policy. The cases are heading to the Supreme Court because nobody—including the government—actually knows what the law permits anymore.

And in Memphis, the National Guard can stay deployed because a state appeals court said so, reversing a lower court that temporarily blocked it. We’ve got three different layers of courts going in different directions on what’s apparently a straightforward constitutional question.

This is what happens when an administration governs by executive order and raw power rather than through the deliberative process that vetting and accountability require. The courts can’t keep up. They’re issuing contradictory rulings because the law itself is being treated as a suggestion.

What’s Really Going On

Here’s my read: We’re not in a period of political crisis so much as an institutional crisis. The mechanisms that used to work—vetting, oversight, the assumption that leaders should at least pretend to follow established rules—have been replaced by something else. Raw power. Personality. Retribution.

In the UK, the PM couldn’t be bothered to properly vet his own senior adviser and nobody made him pay a price for it. In the U.S., the administration is indicting political opponents for absurdist reasons because it can. And across the Atlantic, evangelical voters are leaving a movement that promised them values-based governance and delivered chaos and cruelty instead.

This is the kind of environment where seashell photographs become federal charges. Where you can ignore warnings about Epstein connections. Where nobody knows what the law actually says about detaining immigrants because it’s being rewritten daily through executive orders and court challenges.

I think this gets worse before it gets better. Not because Trump’s uniquely evil or Starmer’s uniquely incompetent, but because both systems have now demonstrated that the traditional guardrails—vetting, accountability, institutional norms—are optional. Once you’ve learned that lesson, you don’t unlearn it.

The question that should terrify both sides of the Atlantic: What does governance look like when nobody believes those guardrails matter anymore?

Photo by Tara Winstead / Pexels

What I’m Watching

• The Supreme Court cases on Trump’s immigration detention policy. Watch whether the Court tries to settle this or dodges. If they dodge, you’ll know they’re worried about legitimacy too. Expect a decision by June 2025.

• Whether Starmer faces any actual consequences for the Mandelson hiring mistake. If the story just dies without an inquiry, that confirms UK parliamentary accountability is theater. Watch for any motion to reintroduce this in Q2 2025.

• How long Trump’s evangelical coalition actually holds. If you see three more major evangelical leaders publicly distance themselves from the administration, that’s your signal the coalition is genuinely fracturing, not just expressing temporary doubts. Timeline: next six months.

• The next political indictment with a tenuous factual basis. Comey’s seashell photo won’t be the last. Watch whether prosecutors in the Justice Department start formally objecting, or whether they’ve already been sorted into compliant and nonexistent.